With the increased popularity of online shopping more and more customers are making purchasing decisions while shopping on the internet. One of the primary reasons that consumers visit online merchandise sites is to research and compare items of interest. Large online retailers and merchants offer substantial databases of consumer-supplied comments and ratings of items, services and vendors. It may be difficult for smaller, or newer, online retailers to rapidly accumulate item reviews and ratings in order to be competitive because potential customers have begun to expect this additional feature. Furthermore, new products may have undeserved low sales because it takes time for reviews to accumulate to a meaningful level, and for products that are purchased with less frequency, item ratings and reviews can be disproportionately skewed by a single positive or negative review.
Additionally, less popular items of the same class may be unduly prejudiced by the lack of reviews, simply because the more popular item has a greater number of reviews and recommendations even though the less popular item may be superior or offer new features. In many cases, newer and more complex items may be reviewed by organizations specializing in product testing and comparison. Such organizations may provide reviews for items and classes of items that are publically available or may require a membership for access. Using either publically available reviews or non-publically available reviews (behind a “paywall”) that require membership, online customers would be aided in their decision making with access to such expert reviews.
Furthermore, it may be difficult for online customers to effectively compare items that are not identical, or substantially identical, because the description provided by the online merchant may be formatted or presented differently from the description provided by another online merchant.
Because of these problems, both customers and retailers may miss the opportunities provided by a more diverse market place. What is needed are systems and methods that can readily provide publicly available and non-publically available reviews for specific items and classes of items while a customer shops on a retailers website. As will be seen, the disclosure provides such methods and systems for providing meaningful reviews during an online shopping session for the items of interest in an effective and elegant manner.